Chicken Tacos con Calabacitas
In honor of Cinco de Mayo I encourage you to wear a flower in your hair, create a Mariachi music station on Pandora, make yourself a margarita and plan to spend the night in.
That is unless of course you like hanging out in over-crowded bars with a bunch of rookies (people who only go out on those designated drinking holidays i.e. St. Patricks Day, New Years Eve, Mardi Gras, Cinco de Mayo and I’m sure a few others I’m forgetting). And since it’s Cinco de Mayo chances are those rookies are drinking tequila and given their inexperience it’s fair to assume they are going to try to go BIG which means someone’s going to get puked on.
You don’t want to get puked on, right? No of course not. Let’s just stay in tonight.
OK take a second to get the above mentioned images out of your head. Back to flowers, Mariachi music, margaritas (in moderation) and…
You need another minute to forget about the hypothetical bar (Maloneys)… sure… go ahead…
Ready? Great.
and…
Tacos and Calabacitas! Ole!
Sure, sure I know you already know how to make tacos. And calaba… what?
Keep reading… we’re not talking ground beef and taco seasoning tacos now. No. I would never. And the calaba… whatchamucallit? Patience my friends.
This is actually one of the first meals I figured out how to make really well. It’s what I made to try to win the belly and hearts of boys I liked, all of whom pale in comparison to the “AMAZING how did I get so lucky!?!” Sweets whose heart and belly I won around the same time he won mine.
It was perfect for Mothers Days dinners, Birthday dinners, thank you for letting me crash on your couch dinners and ohhhh look at me I can cook dinners.
The recipe for both dishes has since made it’s way into the kitchens of many of my friends from Los Angeles to New York. It’s a playa with a passport! Or maybe a playa with some frequent flyer miles? Either way it’s kind of my signature dish.
But apparently I’ve gotten carried away with the whole trying new things stuff because last week after posting a post about shrimp tacos a friend of mine asked me if I had featured my “amazing chicken tacos on S&K yet” (her words) and I realized I had not made this so called signature dish in nearly a year… eeck. Apparently I had lost sight of my roots…
But with a few slaps of a knife, opening of a can and lighting of a stove top… I was back to my roots.
Phew.
Chicken Tacos and Calabacitas (note to my friends & family: there is one very MAJOR and delicious addition I have made to the latter recipe. Be brazen. Try it.)
